REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary
by James Reel

The Merchant-Ivory Connection

Browse The Modern Library's Haute 100

LOOK AT THE MODERN LIBRARY'S LIST of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, and you can easily argue over rankings, neglected titles, undeserving titles and excluded authors of color. But it's more difficult to argue against a more general observation: This list has less to do with the vitality of great literature than with the decline of the book.

Novels aren't getting worse as the century draws to a close, but the book itself is losing its cultural authority, and even the Modern Library's savants have begun to define great fiction less by its status as literature than by its familiarity through other media. Want to know what the great English-language novels are? Go to Blockbuster Video.

In case you've been too busy reading novels to keep up with the news, I'm referring to a list released July 17, 1998, by the Modern Library, which has been publishing affordable editions of standard English-language lit since 1917. By astonishing coincidence, 69 of the list's 100 titles are currently available from Modern Library or its parent company, Random House, or from some other branch of the Bertelsman publishing empire; another 10 items are slated for reissue soon.

The Modern Library editors submitted to their advisory board a list of 200 likely titles, and the members of the board were allowed to write in their own favorites, resulting in a master list of 450 novels that the board gradually winnowed to 100. Voting were Daniel J. Boorstin, A. S. Byatt, Christopher Cerf, Shelby Foote, Vartan Gregorian, Edmund Morris, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Styron and Gore Vidal. Interestingly, Maya Angelou and Larry McMurtry are currently listed as board members, but not as voters; perhaps they were too busy working on novels doomed not to make it to the list.

Very little published since 1975 enjoys a spot among the hallowed hundred. The official excuse is that recent novels can't be included because they have not yet stood the test of time. Well, in that case, the whole damn list should have been put off until well after the end of the century. Perhaps by then such ignored authors as Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, to say nothing of the slighted Nobel laureates Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, would have had time to prove themselves to the board.

Perhaps in 25 years at least one of those authors will be able to nudge out, say, one of the two listed novels by Ford Maddox Ford, a writer who today is generally assumed to be little more than a typographical error. (All right, I admit that's not fair. Every once in awhile I do think idly to myself that I really ought to get around to reading Ford's The Good Soldier, much as I periodically consider that someday I really should look into the Dhammapada and the Analects of Confucius. But not today.)

There -- you see? I'm falling into the trap of disputing individual authors. And that's exactly what the Modern Library wants us to do: discuss literature with lots of heat and at least a bit of enlightenment. Yet that's not what the list is truly about.

Nor is the problem quite what Edvins Beitiks described in the San Francisco Examiner, that the list is another example of "the fast-food mentality brought to history, art and literature. ... It's another sign of the sound-biting of the American intellect, of cutting culture down to USA Today size, making it manageable and easy-to-swallow."

No, the problem is that culture has already been turned into fast food, and we are now judging cows by the quality of our last Big Mac. Clearly, many of the Literary Top 100 rose through the ranks mainly because they've been turned into movies.

How else could William Styron be represented by Sophie's Choice, which became a vehicle for Meryl Streep during her pathetic-heroine-with-an-accent phase, rather than The Confessions of Nat Turner, which received the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction but never made it to the silver screen? The list does include William Kennedy's Ironweed, which took the Pulitzer in 1984, but I can't help suspecting it entered the Modern Library pantheon through the familiarity of its movie incarnation -- interestingly, another Streep vehicle.

The preponderance of titles by E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh, and to a lesser extent Edith Wharton and Henry James, gives the list a suspicious Merchant-Ivory feel. And don't you suppose that E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime came in at number 86 not just because it enjoyed a well-regarded film treatment but because it recently opened as a Broadway musical, one of the most lavishly praised of recent decades? (Poor Jay McInerney; if only the musical version of his previously filmed Bright Lights, Big City had opened in February '98 instead of being projected for February '99, he, too, might have been immortalized on the Modern Library list.)

Any list containing Vladimir Nabokov's unfilmable Pale Fire (no. 53), to say nothing of liberal doses of James Joyce and William Faulkner, can't have abandoned the written word entirely. Still, aren't most of us, even the serious readers among us, more likely to scan the list and say, "Oh, I saw that movie" than "I read that book"?

To my shame, it happened to me. Worse, I've read only about a dozen of the items on the Modern Library list. Conversely, I've seen all but about a dozen of the movies on the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 American movies, announced about a month before the Modern Library's list was released.

When's the last time you heard anyone seriously employ that clichéed conversation opener, "Read any good books lately?" We talk about movies and TV all the time. But even the graduate students in lit that I know tend not to talk books outside the classroom; they flee to the movies for relief, and will come back and parse anything from the latest Russian art film to the oeuvre of Linda Blair. They study books, but live with movies.

What's even more insidious is the fad for "novelizing" movies.

For decades, movies would pillage classic and pop literature for stories, and publishers would give their backlists a little boost by splaying across the covers the banner "Now a major motion picture!" (Just once I'd like to see a jacket proclaiming "Now a minor motion picture.") Interestingly, the top two items on the AFI's list, Citizen Kane and Casablanca, were original screenplays, not adaptations from books, and as far as I know they never appeared in novel form.

But today publishers are making deals with studios to issue slender "novelizations" of original screenplays simultaneously with the release of the film. This is much easier now that nearly every studio is owned by some multinational firm that also owns a publishing house.

Recently I received a flimsy little paperback, three teenagers glaring from the cover, called Disturbing Behavior, which was essentially promoting the new movie of the same name, which is essentially a teen remake of The Stepford Wives. So what I had was a book based on a movie inspired by another movie based on a book, and I'm sure Ira Levin never got a cent out of it.

Even worse is what happened to Great Expectations. Pick up Deborah Chiel's novelization of Alfonso Cuarón's film adaptation of the Charles Dickens tome, and what you hold in your hand is a sort of homeopathic Dickens, the substance of the original novel diluted to the point of inefficacy. Unlike the Leonardo Di Caprio version of Romeo and Juliet, which reset the action in a contemporary city much like Miami but retained Shakespeare's text, Cuarón's Great Expectations wholly inhabits Florida, complete with vacuous updated dialogue. In the end, Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella is given this as her valedictory speech:

"I think of you a lot lately ... For a while I didn't. Then, when I understood things ... life, I guess, better; then I wouldn't let myself. But lately ... Some things you never forget."

This is all repeated in Chiel's novelization, and as Anthony Lane observed in The New Yorker, "This seems to me the essence of novelization -- one of those precious moments when artifice falls away, literature creeps shame-facedly into the wings, and we are left with the naked reality of the movie set. What Chiel gives us here is the unmistakable sound of Gwyneth Paltrow forgetting her lines."

In an earlier column, I proposed that we think of translation as an original performance. But at some point in the current process of adaptation and translation from book to film to book again, the original novel becomes counterfeit. Even so fairly straightforward an adaptation from book to screen as The English Patient requires reworking and streamlining and rebalancing; the result can be a highly effective film that conveys the novel's plot and characterizations with honesty, but not with accuracy, nor with the richness available only from the printed page.

If it is film rather than books through which we form our opinions of literature, we might as well stop reading Lincoln's second inaugural address and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech and judge them only on the basis of the grace and legibility of some secretary's shorthand.

Meanwhile, if the Modern Library list smacks more of the cinema than the bookstore, why pay Random House $15 for some item on the list? For a couple of bucks you can rent what the judges had in mind at your neighborhood video store.

Selected titles discussed in Reel Politik
may be purchased at a discount from The Bookstall.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

Reel Politik 12: How To Read For Yourself

Reel Politik 13: Lies, Damn Lies & The MFA Novel

Reel Politik 14: The Merchant-Ivory Connection

James Reel is the arts and entertainment editor of
The Arizona Daily Star, a contributor to Fanfare,
and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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